GOOD AND BAD IN THE MAKING.
Children have had passed on their moral characteristics the extremes of
human judgment. By some, including a number of theologians, they have
been viewed as steeped in depravity; by others, _e.g._, Rousseau, they
have been regarded as the perfection of the Creator's workmanship.
If we are to throw any light on the point in dispute we must avoid the
unfairness of applying grown-up standards to childish actions, and must
expect neither the vices nor the virtues of manhood. We must further
take some pains to get, so far as this is possible, at children's
natural inclinations so as to see whether, and if so how far, they set
in the direction of good or of bad.
_Traces of the Brute._
Even a distant acquaintance with the first years of human life tells us
that young children have much in common with the lower animals. The
characteristic feelings and impulses are centred in self and the
satisfaction of its wants. What is better marked, for example, than the
boundless greed of the child, his keen desire to appropriate and enjoy
whatever presents itself, and to resent others' participation in such
enjoyment?
We note, further, that when later on he makes fuller acquaintance with
his social surroundings, his first attitude has in it much of the
hostility of the Ishmaelite. The removal of the feeding bottle before
full satisfaction has been attained is, as we know, the occasion for one
of the most impressive utterances of the baby's "will to live," and of
its resentment of all human checks to its native impulses. Here we have
the first rude germ of that opposition of will which makes the
Ishmaelite look on others as his foes.
The same attitude of isolating hostility is apt to show itself towards
other children. In the matter of toys, for example, the natural way of a
child is very frequently not only to make free with other children's
property when he has the chance, but to show the strongest objection to
any imitation of this freedom by others, sometimes indeed to display a
dog-in-the-manger spirit by refusing to lend what he himself does not
want.
The same vigorous egoism inspires the whole scale of childish envies and
jealousies, from those having to do with things of the appetite to those
which trouble themselves about the marks of others' good-will, such as
caresses and praises.
In this wide category of childish egoisms we seem to be near the level
of animal ways. Out of all this fierce pushing of desire whereby the
child comes into rude collision with others' wishes, there issue the
storms of young passion. The energy of these displays of wrath as the
imperious little will feels itself suddenly pulled up has in spite of
its comicality something impressive. We all know the shocking scene as
the boy Ishmaelite gives clearest and most emphatic utterance to his
will by hitting out with his arms, stamping and kicking, throwing things
down on the floor and breaking them, and accompanying this war-dance
with savage howlings and yellings. The outburst tends to concentrate
itself in a real attack on somebody. Sometimes this is the offender, as
when Darwin's boy at the age of two years and three months would throw
books, sticks, etc., at any one who offended him. But almost anybody or
anything will do as an object of attack. A child of four on having his
lordly purpose crossed would bang his chair, and then proceed to vent
his displeasure on his unoffending toy lion, banging him, jumping on
him, and, as anti-climax, threatening him with the loss of his dinner.
Hitting is in many cases improved upon by biting.
Such fits of temper, as we call them, vary in their manner from child to
child. Thus, whereas one little boy would savagely bite or roll on the
floor, his sister was accustomed to dance about and stamp. They vary
greatly too in their frequency and their force. Some children show in
their anger little if anything of savage furiousness. It is to be added,
that with those who do show it, it is wont in most cases to appear only
for a limited period.
The resemblance of this fierce anger to the fury of the savage and of
the brute can hardly fail to be noticed. Here indeed, as is illustrated
in the good hymn of our nursery days, which bids us leave biting to the
dogs, we see most plainly how firmly planted an animal root lies at the
bottom of our proud humanity. Ages of civilisation have not succeeded in
eradicating some of the most characteristic and unpleasant impulses of
the brute.
At the same time a child's passionateness is more than a brute instinct.
He suffers consciously; he realises himself in lonely antagonism to a
world. This is seen in the bodily attitude of dejection which often
follows the more vigorous stage of the fit, when the little Ishmaelite,
growing aware of the impotence of his anger, is wont to throw himself on
the floor and to hide his head in solitary wretchedness. This
consciousness of absolute isolation and hostility reaches a higher phase
when the opposing force is distinctly apprehended as human will. A dim
recognition of the stronger will facing him brings the sense of injury,
of tyrannous power.
Now this feeling of being injured and oppressed is human, and is fraught
with moral possibilities. It is not as yet morally good; for the sense
of injury is capable of developing, and may actually turn by-and-by
into, hatred. Yet, as we shall see, it holds within itself a promise of
something higher.
This predominance of self, this kinship with the unsocial brute, which
shows itself in these germinal animosities, seems to be discoverable
also in the unfeelingness of children. A common charge against them from
those who are not on intimate terms with them, and sometimes, alas, from
those who are, is that they are heartless and cruel.
That children often appear to the adult as unfeeling as a stone, is, I
suppose, incontestable. The troubles which harass and oppress the mother
may leave her small companion quite unconcerned. He either goes on
playing with undisturbed cheerfulness, or he betrays a momentary
curiosity about some trivial circumstance of her affliction which is
worse than the absorption in play through its tantalising want of any
genuine feeling. If, for example, she is ill, the event is interesting
to him merely as supplying him with new treats. A little boy of four,
after spending half an hour in his mother's sick-room, coolly informed
his nurse: "I have had a very nice time, mamma's ill!" The order of the
two statements is significant of the common attitude of mind of children
towards others' sufferings.
When it comes to the bigger human troubles this want of fellow-feeling
is still more noticeable. Nothing is more shocking to the adult observer
of children than their coldness and stolidity in presence of death.
While a whole house is stricken with grief at the loss of a beloved
inmate the child is wont to preserve his serenity, being often taken
with a shocking curiosity to peep into the dead room, and to get perhaps
the gruesome pleasure of touching the dead body so as to know what "as
cold as death" means, and at best showing only a feeling of awe before a
great mystery.
No one, I think, will doubt that judged by our standards children are
often profoundly and shockingly callous. But the question arises here,
too, whether we are right in applying our grown-up standards. It is one
thing to be indifferent with full knowledge of suffering, another to be
indifferent in the sense in which a cat might be said to be so at the
spectacle of your falling or burning your finger. We are apt to forget
that a large part of the manifestation of human suffering is quite
unintelligible to a little child.
Again, when an appeal to serious attention is given, a child is apt to
spy something besides the sadness. The little girl who wanted to touch,
and to know the meaning of "cold as death," on going to see a dead
schoolmate was not unnaturally taken up with the beauty of the scene,
with the white hangings and the white flowers.
I am far from saying that the first acquaintance with death commonly
leaves a child indifferent to the signs of woe. I believe, on the
contrary, that children are frequently affected in a vague way by the
surrounding gloom. In some cases, too, as published reminiscences of
childhood show, the first acquaintance with the cruel monarch has
sometimes shaken a child's whole being with an infinite, nameless sense
of woe.
With this unfeelingness children are frequently charged with active
unkindness, amounting to cruelty. La Fontaine spoke of the age of
childhood as pitiless (_sans pitie_).
This appearance of cruelty will now and again show itself in dealings
with other children. One of the trying situations of early life is to
find oneself supplanted by the arrival of a new baby. Children, I have
reason to think, are, in such circumstances, capable of coming
shockingly near to a feeling of hatred. One little girl was taken with
so violent an antipathy to a baby which she considered outrageously ugly
as to make a beginning, fortunately only a feeble beginning, at smashing
its head, much as she would no doubt have tried to destroy an
ugly-looking doll.
Such malicious treatment of smaller infants is, I think, rare. More
common is the exhibition of the signs of cruelty in the child's dealings
with animals. It is of this, indeed, that we mostly think when we speak
of his cruelty.
At first nothing seems clearer than the evidence of malevolent intention
in a child's treatment of animals. A little girl when only a year old
would lift two kittens by the neck and try to stamp on them. Older
children often have a way of treating even their pets with a similar
roughness.
Yet I think we cannot safely say that such rough usage is intended to be
painful. It seems rather to be the outcome of the mere energy of the
childish impulse to hold, possess, and completely dominate his pet.
The case of destructive cruelty, as when a small boy crushes a fly, is
somewhat different. Let me give a well-observed instance. A little boy
of two years and two months, "after nearly killing a fly on the
window-pane, seemed surprised and disturbed, looking round for an
explanation, then gave it himself: 'Mr. Fly dom (gone) to by-by'. But he
would not touch it or another fly again--a doubt evidently remained, and
he continued uneasy about it." Here the arrest of life clearly brought a
kind of shock, and we may safely say was not thought out beforehand.
Children may pounce upon and maul small moving things for a number of
reasons. The wish to gratify their sense of power--which is probably
keener in children who so rarely gratify it than in grown-ups--will
often explain these actions. To stop all that commotion, all that
buzzing on the window-pane, by a single tap of the finger, that may
bring a delicious thrill of power to a child. Curiosity, too, is a
powerful incentive to this kind of maltreatment of animals. Children
have something of the anatomist's impulse to take living things apart,
to see where the blood is, as one child put it, and so forth.
I think, then, that we may give the small offenders the benefit of the
doubt, and not attribute their rough handling of animals to a wish to
inflict pain, or even to an indifference to pain of which they are
clearly aware. Wanton activity, the curiosity of the experimenter, and
delight in showing one's power and producing an effect, seem sufficient
to explain a large part of the unlearned brutality of the first years.
We have now looked at one of the darkest sides of the child and have
found that though it is decidedly unpleasant it is not quite so ugly as
it has been painted. Children are no doubt apt to be greedy, and
otherwise unsociable, to be ferocious in their anger, and to be sadly
wanting in consideration for others; yet it is some consolation to
reflect that their savageness is not quite that of brutes, and that
their selfishness and cruelty are a long way removed from a deliberate
and calculating egoism.
_The Promise of Humanity._
Pure Ishmaelite as he seems, however, a child has what we call the
social instincts, and inconsistently enough no doubt he shows at times
that after all he wants to join himself to those whom at other times he
treats as foes. If he has his outbursts of temper he has also his fits
of tenderness. If he is now dead to others' sufferings he is at another
time taken with a most amiable childish concern for their happiness.
The germ of this instinct of attachment to society may be said to
disclose itself in a rude form in the first weeks of life, when he
begins to get used to and to depend on the human presence, and is
miserable when this is taken from him.
In this instinct of companionship there is involved a vague inarticulate
kind of sympathy. Just as the attached dog may be said to have in a dim
fashion a feeling of oneness with its master, so the child. The intenser
realisation of this oneness comes after separation. A girl of thirteen
months was separated from her mother during six weeks. On the return of
the latter she was speechless, and for some time could not bear to leave
her restored companion for a minute. A like outbreak of tender sympathy
is apt to follow a fit of naughtiness when a child feels itself taken
back to the mother's heart.
Sympathy, it is commonly said, is a kind of imitation, and this is
strikingly illustrated in its early forms. A child has been observed
under the age of seven months to look unhappy, drawing down well the
corners of the mouth in the characteristic baby-fashion when his nurse
pretended to cry.
This imitative sympathy deepens with attachment. We see something of it
in the child's make-believe. When, for example, a little girl on finding
that her mother's head ached pretended to have a bad head, we appear to
see the working of an impulse to get near and share in others'
experiences. The same feeling shows itself in play, especially in the
treatment of the doll, which has to go through all that the child goes
through, to be bathed, scolded, nursed when poorly, and so forth.
From this imitative acting of another's trouble, so as to share in it,
there is but a step to that more direct apprehension of it which we call
sympathy. Children sometimes begin to display such understanding of
others' trouble early in the second year. One mite of fourteen months
was quite concerned at the misery of an elder sister, crawling towards
her and making comical endeavours by grunts and imitative movements of
the fingers to allay her crying. I have a number of stories showing that
for a period beginning early in the second year it is not uncommon for
children to betray an exuberance of pity, being moved almost to tears,
for example, when the mother says, "_Poor_ uncle!" or when contemplating
in a picture the tragic fate of Humpty Dumpty.
Very sweet and sacred to a mother are the first manifestations of
tenderness towards herself. A child about the age of two has a way of
looking at and touching its mother's face with something of the
rapturous expression of a lover. Still sweeter, perhaps, are the first
clear indications of loving concern. The temporary loss of her presence,
due to illness or other cause, is often the occasion for the appearance
of a deeper tenderness. A little boy of three spontaneously brought his
story-book to his mother when she lay in bed ill; and the same child
used to follow her about after her recovery with all the devotion of a
little knight. At other times it is the suspicion of an injury to his
beloved one, as when one little fellow seeing the strange doctor lay
hold of his mother's wrist stood up like an outraged turkey-cock,
backing into his mother's skirts, ready to charge the assaulter.
A deeper and thoughtful kind of sympathy often comes with the advent of
the more reflective years. Thought about the overhanging terror, death,
is sometimes its awakener. "Are you old, mother?" asked a boy of five.
"Why?" she answered. "Because," he continued, "the older you are the
nearer you are to dying." There was no doubt thought of his own loss in
this question: yet there was, one may hope, a germ of solicitude for the
mother too.
This first thought for others frequently takes the practical form of
helpfulness. A child loves nothing better than to assist in little
household occupations. A boy of two years and one month happened to
overhear his nurse say to herself: "I wish that Anne would remember to
fill the nursery boiler". "He listened, and presently trotted off; found
the said Anne doing a distant grate, pulled her by the apron, saying:
'Nanna, Nanna!' (come to nurse). She followed, surprised and puzzled,
the child pulling all the way, till, having got her into the nursery, he
pointed to the boiler, and added: 'Go dare, go dare,' so that the girl
comprehended and did as he bade her."
With this practical form of sympathy there goes a quite charming
disposition to give pleasure in other ways. A little girl when just a
year old was given to offering her toys, flowers, and other pretty
things to everybody. Generosity is as truly an impulse of childhood as
greediness, and it is odd to observe their alternate play. Early in the
second year, too, children are wont to show themselves kindly by giving
kisses and other pretty courtesies. In truth from about this date they
are often quite charming in their expressions of good will, so that the
good Bishop Earle hardly exaggerates when he writes of the child: "He
kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on
his beater". Later on a like amiable disposition will show itself in
graceful turns of speech, as when a little girl, aged three and a
quarter, petitioned her mother this wise: "Please, mamma, will you pin
this with the greatest pleasure?"
Just as there are these beginnings of affectionate concern for the
mother and other people, so there is ample evidence of kindness to
animals. The charge of cruelty in the case of little children is,
indeed, seen to be a gross libel as soon as we consider their whole
behaviour towards the animal world.
When once the first fear of the strangeness is mastered a child will
generally take kindly to an animal. A little boy of fifteen months
quickly overcame his fright at the barking of his grandfather's dog, and
began to share his biscuits with him, to give him flowers to smell, and
to throw stones for his amusement.
At a quite early age, too, children will show the germ of a truly humane
feeling towards animals. The same little boy that bravely got over his
fear of the dog's barking would, when nineteen months old, begin to cry
on seeing a horse fall in the street. Stronger manifestations of pity
are seen at a later age. A little boy of four was moved to passionate
grief at the sight of a dead dog taken from a pond.
The indignation of children at the doings of the butcher, the hunter and
others, shows how deeply pitiful consideration for animals is rooted in
their hearts. This is one of the most striking manifestations of the
better side of child-nature and deserves a chapter to itself.
The close absorbing sympathy which we often observe between a child and
animals seems to come from a sense of common weaknesses and needs.
Perhaps there is in it something of that instinctive impulse of helpless
things to band together which we see in sheep and other gregarious
animals. A mother once remarked to her boy, between five and six years
old: "Why, R., I believe you are kinder to the animals than to me".
"Perhaps I am," he replied, "you see they are not so well off as you
are."
The same outpourings of affection are seen in the dealings of children
with their toy babies and animals. Allowing for occasional outbreaks of
temper and acts of violence, a child's intercourse with his doll or his
toy "gee gee" is a wonderful display of loving solicitude; a solicitude
which has something of the endurance of a maternal instinct.
Here, too, as we know, children vary greatly; there are the loving and
the unloving moods, and there are the loving and the unloving children.
Yet allowing for these facts, I think it may be said that in these first
fresh outgoings of human tenderness we have a comforting set off to the
unamiable manifestations described above.
_The Lapse into Lying._
The other main charge against children is that they tell lies. According
to many, children are in general accomplished little liars, to the
manner born, and equally adept with the mendacious savage. Even writers
on childhood who are by no means prejudiced against it lean to the view
that lying is instinctive and universal among children.
Now it is surely permissible to doubt whether little children have so
clear an apprehension of what we understand by truth and falsity as to
be liars in this full sense. Much of what seems shocking to the adult
unable to place himself at the level of childish intelligence and
feeling will probably prove to be something far less serious.
To begin with those little ruses and dissimulations which are said to
appear almost from the cradle in the case of certain children, it is
plainly difficult to bring them into the category of full-fledged lies.
When, for example, a child wishing to keep a thing hides it, and on your
asking for it holds out empty hands, it would be hard to name this
action a lie, even though there may be in it a germ of deception. These
little ruses or "acted lies" seem at the worst to be attempts to put you
off the scent in what is regarded as a private matter, and to have the
minimum of intentional deception. This childish passion for guarding
secrets may account for later and more serious-looking falsehoods.
There is a more alarming appearance of mendacity when the child comes to
the use of language and proffers statements which, if he reflected, he
might know to be false. Even here, however, we may easily apply grown-up
standards unfairly. Anybody who has observed children's play and knows
how real to them their fancies become for the moment will be chary of
applying to their sayings the word "lie". There may be solemn sticklers
for truth who would be shocked to hear the child when at play saying, "I
am a coachman," "Dolly is crying," and so forth. But the discerning see
nothing to be alarmed at here.
On the same level of moral obliquity I should be disposed to place those
cases where a child will contradictingly say the opposite of what he is
told. A little French boy was overheard saying to himself: "Papa parle
mal, il a dit _sevette_, bebe parle bien, il dit _serviette_". Such
reversals may be a kind of play too: the child not unnaturally gets
tired now and then of being told that he is wrong, and for the moment
imagines himself right and his elders wrong, immensely enjoying the
idea.
The case looks graver when an "untruth" is uttered in answer to a
question. A little boy on being asked by his mother who told him
something, answered, "Dolly". "False, and knowingly false," somebody
will say, especially when he learns that the depraved youngster
instantly proceeded to laugh. But is not this laugh just the saving
clause of the story, suggesting that it was play and the spirit of
mischief at bottom?
In this case, I suspect, there was co-operant a strongly marked childish
characteristic, the love of producing an effect. A child has a large
measure of that feeling which R. L. Stevenson attributes to the
light-hearted Innes in _Weir of Hermiston_, "the mere pleasure of
beholding interested faces". The well-known "cock and bull" stories of
small children are inspired by this love of strong effect. It is the
dramatic impulse of childhood endeavouring to bring life into the
dulness of the serious hours. Childish vanity often assists, as where a
little girl of five would go about scattering the most alarming kind of
false news, as, for example, that baby was dead, simply to court
attention and make herself of some importance.
A quick vivid fancy, a childish passion for acting a part, these, backed
by a strong impulse to astonish, and a playful turn for contradiction
and paradox, seem to me to account for most of this early fibbing and
other similar varieties of early misstatement. Naughty it is, no doubt,
in a measure; but is it quite fairly branded as lying, that is, as a
serious attempt to deceive?
In some cases, I think, the vivid play of imagination which prompts the
untrue assertion may lead to a measure of self-deception. When, for
example, an Italian child, of whom Signorina Lombroso tells us, who is
out for a walk, and wanting to be carried says, "My leg hurts me and my
foot too just here, I can't walk, I can't, I can't," it is possible at
least that the vivid imagination of the South produces at the moment an
illusory sense of fatigue. And if so we must hesitate to call the
statement wholly a falsehood.
A fertile source of childish "untruth," which may be more true than
untrue in the sense of expressing the conviction of the moment, is the
wish to please. An emotional child who in a sudden fit of tenderness for
his mother gushes out, "You're the best mother in the whole world!" may
be hardly conscious of any exaggeration. There is more of artfulness in
the flatteries which appear to involve a calculating intention to say
the nice agreeable thing. Some children, especially little girls, are, I
believe, adepts at these amenities. Those in whom the impulse is strong
and dominant are perhaps those who in later years make the good society
actors. Yet if there is a measure of untruth in such pretty flatteries,
one needs to be superhuman in order to condemn them harshly.
The other side of this wish to please is the fear to give offence, and
this, I suspect, may point to a more intentional and conscious kind of
untruth. If, for example, a child is asked whether he does not like or
admire something, his feeling that the questioner expects him to say
"Yes" makes it very hard to say "No". Mrs. Burnett gives us a
reminiscence of this early experience. When she was less than three, she
writes, a lady visitor, a friend of her mother, having found out that
the baby newly added to the family was called Edith, remarked to her:
"That's a pretty name. My baby is Eleanor. Isn't that a pretty name?" On
being thus questioned she felt in a dreadful difficulty, for she did not
like the sound of "Eleanor," and yet feared to be rude and say so. She
got out of it by saying she did not like the name as well as "Edith".
In such cases as this the fear to give offence may be reinforced by the
mastering force of "suggestion". Just as the hypnotiser "suggests" to
his subject the idea that he is ill, that the dirty water in this glass
is wine, and so forth, compelling him to accept and act out the idea, so
we all exercise a kind of suggestive sway over children's minds. Our
leading questions, as when we say, "Isn't this pretty?" may for a moment
set up a half belief that the thing must be so. Thus in a double fashion
do our words control children's thoughts, driving them now into
contradiction, drawing them at other times and in other moods into
submissive assent. Wordsworth has illustrated how an unwise and
importunate demand for a reason from a child may drive him into
invention.[9]
[9] See his poem, _Anecdote for Fathers, showing how the practice
of lying may be taught_. ("Poems referring to the period of
childhood.")
I do not say that these are the only impulses which prompt to this early
fibbing. From some records of the first years I learn that a child may
drift into something like a lie under the pressure of fear, more
especially fear of being scolded. One little fellow, more than once
instanced in this work, a single child brought up wholly by his mother,
perpetrated his first fib when he was about twenty-two months old. He
went, it seems, and threw his doll down stairs in one of those
capricious outbursts towards favourites which children share with
certain sovereigns, then went to his mother and making great pretence of
grief said, "Poor dolly tumbled". If this had stood alone I should have
been ready to look on it as a little childish comedy; but the same child
a month or two afterwards would invent a fib when he wanted his mother
to do something. For example, he was one morning lying in bed with his
mother and wanted much to get up. His mother told him to look for the
watch and see what time it was. He felt under the pillow pretending to
find and consult the time-teller, saying: "Time to get up". Here it was
clearly the force of the young will resisting an unpleasant check which
excited the sober faculties to something like deception.
To say that our moral discipline with its injunctions, its corrections,
is a great promoter of childish untruth may sound shocking, but it is I
think an indisputable truth. We can see how this begins to work in the
first years. For example, a mite of three having in a moment of temper
called her mother "monkey," and being questioned as to what she had
said, replied: "I said _I_ was a monkey". A child is often driven into
such ruses by the instinct of self-protection.
Our system of discipline may develop untruth in other ways too. When,
for example, punishment has been inflicted and its inflicter, relenting,
asks: "Are you sorry?" or "Aren't you sorry?" the answer is exceedingly
likely to be "No," even though this may at the moment be half felt to be
untrue. From such partial untruths the way is easy to complete ones, as
when a naughty little boy who is shut up in his room and kept without
food, is asked: "Are you hungry?" and with the hardihood of a confirmed
sinner answers "No," even though the low and dismal tone of the word
shows how much the untruth goes against the grain.
I think there is no doubt, then, that at a certain age children may,
more especially under a severe home authority, develop, apart from
contagion, a tendency to falsehood. Some may see in this, as in childish
fears and cruelties, rudiments of characteristics which belonged to
remote uncivilised ancestors. However this be, it is hard to say that
these fibs have that clear intention to deceive which constitutes a
complete lie.
There are curious points in the manner of childish fibbing. A good many
children seem to be like savages in distinguishing those to whom one is
bound to speak the truth. The "bad form" of telling a lie to the
head-master is a later illustration of the same thing. On the other hand
it seems to be thought that there are people who are specially fitted
to be the victims of untruth. Even young children soon find out who it
is among the servants that being credulous supplies the best listener to
their amazing inventions.
Another interesting point is the way in which the perfectly baseless
fictions of children are apt to grow into permanent "stories". In the
nursery and in the playground there are wont to be developed myths and
legends which are solemnly believed by the simple-minded, and may be
handed down to successors. In all such cases of propagated untruths the
impulse of imitation and the tendency of the child's mind to accept
statements uncritically are of course at work. The "lie" propagated by
this influence of contagion very soon ceases to be a lie.
_Fealty to Truth._
In order to understand what childish untruth really amounts to we must
carefully note its after-effects on the perpetrator. It seems certain
that many children experience a qualm of conscience when uttering that,
of the falsity of which they are more or less aware. This is evidenced
in the well-known devices by which the young casuist thinks to mitigate
the lie; as when on saying what he knows to be false he adds mentally,
"I do not mean it," "in my mind," or some similar palliative. Such
subterfuges show a measure of sensibility, for a hardened liar would
despise the shifts, and are curious as illustrations of the childish
conscience and its unlearnt casuistry.
The remorse that sometimes follows lying, especially the first lie,
which catches the conscience at its tenderest, is much more than this
passing qualm, and has been remembered by many in later life. Here is a
case. A young lady whom I know remembers that when a child of four she
had to wear a shade over her eyes. One day on walking out with her
mother she was looking, child-wise, sidewards instead of in front, and
nearly struck a lamp-post. Her mother then scolded her, but presently
remembering the eyes, said: "Poor child, you could not see well". She
knew that this was not the reason, but she accepted it, and for long
afterwards was tormented with a sense of having told a lie.
Such remorse, in certain cases prolonged beyond the first lie, comes to
the little offender as he or she lies in bed and recalls the untruths of
the day. Some children suffer greatly from this periodic reflection on
their lies.
Some of the more poignant of the sufferings which come to the sensitive
child from saying what is false are those of fear, fear of those
terrific penalties which religious teaching attaches to the lying
tongue. It seems likely that childish devices for allaying their qualms
when saying what is untrue are intended somehow to make things right
with God, and so to avoid the dreaded chastisement. I am sure, too, that
the subsequent remorse, especially at night, is very largely a dread of
some awful manifestation of God's wrath.
While I should set down much of this horror of children at discovering
themselves liars to a dread of supernatural penalties, I should not set
down the whole. I am disposed to think that there is another force at
work in the little people's consciousness.
In order to explain what I mean, I must begin by saying that a tendency
towards conscious falsehood, though common, does not seem to be
universal among children. Several mothers assure me that their children
have never seriously put forth an untruth. I can say the same about two
children who have been especially observed for the purpose.
I am ready to go further and to suggest that where a child is brought up
normally, that is, in a habitually truth-speaking community, he tends,
quite apart from moral instruction, to acquire a respect for truth. One
may easily see that children accustomed to truth-speaking show all the
signs of a moral shock when they are confronted with a false statement.
I remember after more than twelve years one little boy's outbreaks of
righteous indignation at meeting with untrue statements about his
beloved horses and other things in one of his books, for which he had
all a child's reverence. The idea of knowingly perpetrating an untruth,
so far as I can judge, is simply awful to a child who has been
thoroughly habituated to the practice of truthful statement. May it,
then, not well be that when a preternatural pressure of circumstances
pushes the child over the boundary line of truth, he feels a shock, a
horror, a giddy and aching sense of having violated law--law not wholly
imposed by the mother's command, but rooted in the very habits of social
life?
Our inquiry has led us to recognise, in the case of cruelty and of lying
alike, that children are by no means morally perfect, but have
tendencies which, if not counteracted or held in check by others, will
develop into the vices of cruelty and lying. On the other hand it has
shown us that there are other and counteracting impulses, germs of human
sympathy and of respect for the binding custom of truthfulness. So far
from saying that child-nature is utterly bad or beautifully perfect, we
should say that it is a disorderly jumble of impulses, each pushing
itself upwards in lively contest with the others, some towards what is
bad, others towards what is good. It is on this motley group of
tendencies that the hand of the moral cultivator has to work, selecting,
arranging, organising into a beautiful whole.